Update on TTW and Yoshi

[hunter]

136. I imagine I understand this situation because it reminds me so much of my grandma...

... the difference being that my grandma got a job as a shipyard welder during World War II and made a career of it, retiring with a home she fully owned, a pension, and Social Security. She was never a nice person. But certain sorts of welding jobs in the very masculine ship building industry of her time, jobs that were said to require a "womans touch," were the reason they kept her on after the war. She knew hot metal. Her personal relationships were always a firestorm, the worst with my grandpa, 'til death do us part, and it did. I don't think my grandma was ever a fully functional human being in this society outside her work. Neither am I sometimes.

When she retired my grandma had nothing but her house, her pension, her whiskey, and her horrible cat all fangs and claws which mostly seemed to tolerate her, but hated everyone else. I have scars from that cat. My grandma would say the meanest things to everyone, and she always ended up hating anyone whoever tried to help her. She could also be as violent as her cat. I have scars from my grandma too.

Eventually my grandma had to be removed from her home as a danger to herself and others. Honestly, retirement is what killed her. In prehistoric times she would have died working flint tools or losing an argument with a grizzly bear over dinner. It took the police and paramedics several hours to drag grandma out of her house. She was throwing things, hitting, clawing, kicking, biting and yelling very foul things the entire time.

My grandma would move between "extended care" facilities and the master bedroom of my mom and dad's house. The cat lived under the bed in the master bedroom full time and would attack anyone who entered. So would my grandma. Feeding the cat or feeding grandma was always an adventure. Changing the cat's litter box or asking grandma to bathe was a more dangerous adventure.

My grandma couldn't live at home permanently, she was impossible to live with after a few months, always analyzing the weakest links, finding the most hurtful words or actions. Extended care places, even places that claimed some expertise with mean old crazy people, they couldn't handle her more than a few months either. So she'd moved back and forth. My grandma's own mom was a similar sort, but she lived by herself in a very rural place into her nineties, and everyone for miles around, county sheriff and family included, knew always to approach her with extreme caution.

Of course my mom is terrified of her family history and used to make us promise we'd leave her on an uninhabited island somewhere, or even throw her into a volcano, if she ever became that kind of burden on us. But she's older than my grandma now, retired, and is still a nice person most of the time, although she lives with my dad in a rain forest thousands of miles away, they drink and bathe in water that falls on their roof, buy food in the local farmers market, and I've never visited the place. But my siblings who've been there say it's very nice.

Anyways, I believe as human beings we are obligated to take care of one another. Our modern U.S.A. society lacks the social safety nets required to take care of everyone. There are huge gaps. The gap between those who are thankful for charity and welfare (their gratitude feigned or not) and those who need to be locked away in some kind of prison, this gap is a deeply disturbing one to me.

I know myself, that off my meds and alienated from family, my natural state is feral human. At my worst I've lived in my broken car in a church parking lot, not telling my family I was without housing and "asked" to take time off from university for fighting with a teaching assistant and other odd behavior.

My college house mates would tell anyone I was a strange person with weird eating habits who could appear and disappear at any time without rhyme or reason. Heck, my parents would probably say the same of me, starting in middle school. Two of my siblings left home at sixteen, not because home was bad, but because they had things to do, places to go. Me and a sibling quit high school. Oddly, the two of us who quit high school are the ones with the university degrees.

It's this gap in the social safety net I can see myself falling into, and the hell of it is, I won't recognize it when I'm there. I'll be one of those neat, quiet, homeless guys in the library reading the science journals, scribbling in my notebooks.